Our Opinion: An opportunity for clergy abuse reform

BERKSHIRE (MA)
Berkshire Eagle

Dec. 18, 2019

Pope Francis’ decision to end the Vatican’s secrecy policy on sexual abuse cases is a welcome act that had it come years earlier could have spared victims and the Catholic Church itself so much misery. Unfortunately, the new policy contains loopholes that would allow miscreants and the church officials protecting to them to slip through once more.

The decision overturns a 2001 Vatican decree making sexual abuse allegations against clergy a “pontifical secret,” the church’s most classified form of knowledge, which kept those allegations out of the purview of criminal authorities. In abolishing this policy, such information can be turned over to police, prosecutors and judges.

The policy is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It does not require that dioceses turn over this information, meaning that church officials who oppose this edict can simply ignore it. The Vatican is unclear in its decision as to whether or not it applies retroactively or only to new allegations. Vatican critics note that the Church still hasn’t adopted a policy of automatically defrocking any priest who has abused a child, which undermines the Vatican’s apparently sincere efforts to enact reform.

The Catholic Church’s policy of circling the wagons around credibly accused priests while blaming the victims and the media has done great harm to victims and to the credibility and financial viability of churches all over the world, including in Berkshire County within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield. The most recent example within the Diocese came earlier this year when it denied that a Chicopee man’s accusation that he had been abused by Bishop Christopher J. Weldon when he served as an altar boy in the 1960s was credible. A Diocesan review board made that conclusion even though some board members who took part in the process told The Eagle that they found the accusations to be extremely credible. In June, the diocese acknowledged that the accusations were credible, leaving the integrity of the in-house review process in tatters.

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